News

On 18th January, wikipedia.or among other estimated 10,000 web sites stopped their service in order to protest against the US legislation planning to endorse SOPA and PIPA. Software engineers might think, that they are not affected by the legislation, especially if they are outside the U.S., but considering Big Data, Cloud Computing and other trends this could be a rather naive perspective.

Patents are quite often in the news these days, most notably the ones related to smart phone vendors like HTC, Samsung, Google and Apple. This also holds for the rather emotional and controversial discussion about software patents which some consider as a means to ensure innovation and others as a kind of weapon. Do software patents cause more harm than good, or vice versa?

SUSE, formally part of Novell, has renewed its interoperability agreement with Microsoft for five more years. This agreement includes a 100 million investment in “new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates”. And like the last agreement it raises more questions than answers.

Today Microsoft and Xandros announced an agreement similar in terms to the one announced last fall with Novell. This brings the number of Linux distributions with IP assurance to two and while JBoss is mentioned in the article, noticeably missing is Red Hat. The last commitment by Microsoft is striking, as it will now endorse Xandros as the preferred Linux distribution.